“She's not going to the October event,” he said.
Billy looked at his back for a moment. “Hargrove—”
“Has no say. I paid for her.” He turned around. “She's not going.”
Billy looked at him for a long moment, then — put his jacket on and moved toward the window.
“The town calls her yours,” he said, one hand on the frame. “Make sure you know what that means before she decides what it’ssupposedto mean.”
He dropped out the window.
The study was quiet. Somewhere a low, rough voice called out Billy’s name with a certain kind of vengeful frustration. The bourbon sat untouched in the glass. Judah stood in the middle of the room with the October event on one side and Mercy asleep in his bed on the other and did what he always did when the accounting didn't balance.
He stayed very still and waited for the numbers to change.
Only they didn't.
I woke up wrong.
Not gradually.
Immediatelywrong. My body making decisions my brain hadn't caught up to.
I managed to get to the bathroom in time.
Barely.
I knelt on the cold black tile and spewed up everything I had managed to swallow the day before and waited to see if there was more to come. There was. Then there wasn't. I sat back against the tub and pressed my forehead to the porcelain, breathing through my nose until the room stopped tilting.
Food poisoning, I thought. Something from last night. The heat did things to food in Louisiana that it didn't do elsewhere — Darlene had warned me about that in my first week; I had only half-listened, thought myself mightier than a stomach ache because I was from Mississippi and Iknewwhat heat meant.
I didn’t know squat.
I got up. Got dressed. Did it slowly, in stages, stopping twice. The lace was on the chair — a new set — and I looked at it and thought: not today. Put on cotton instead.
Wanted to put on nothing at all. It wasthatbad.
Eventually I went to work.
The drive to the church took ten minutes and I spent eight of them with the window down and my face in the air like a dog.
Darlene took one look at me and pointed at the chair across from her desk.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat.
She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead, which was such a maternal thing to do that something in my chest contracted. “You're pale as milk,” she said. “When did it start?”
“This morning. I think it's something I ate.”
She made a sound. “Mrs. Fontenot's grandchildren have been down with something since Thursday. Half the congregation's had it.” She was already pulling her keys from her drawer. “Go home. Rest. Drink water, notcoffee.”
He shot me a long look.
I didn’t drink coffeethatmuch.
She kept looking.
